But I have come to realize that we are not being the best we can be by focusing on just the overall website conversion rate. We are leaving money on the table. We are not getting enough credit. We are not getting a good understanding of the complete picture. We are being short sighted.

Regardless of why your website exists it is quite likely that there is a rich diversity in reasons why people come to your website (hence the core pitch to understanding Primary Purpose using 4Q: The Best Free Online Survey For A Website). Conversion being just one of them ("please please let me in, I want to be converted!!").

What about those who refuse to be converted online?

You worked hard (hopefully!) to get them to the site, if they did not convert did you accomplish nothing?

You have your two percent conversion rate (though just to be generous I am probably showing a number much higher than that above). You should be happy, atleast you are up to some benchmarks in that space.

But what do you do in terms of measuring complete success of your website? All that white "space" (Unique Visitors) wasted for nothing?

No. Well maybe some.

But people don't just come to your site to Buy. They are there to Research products and services (and buy offline). They are looking to get Support. They are there for looking for Jobs. They might be there to look at your latest Blog Post, etc.

Make each one of those your Micro Conversions. Identify what they should be using 4Q and then using your Web Analytics tools to measure success.

Nothing wasted, every activity on the site measured for success in some small or big way.

Here's a view that might apply for your ecommerce website. . . .

For the macro conversion you measure Outcomes (say orders, see this post for definitions: Conversion Rate Basics & Best Practices). For micro conversions you could measure page views and job applications submitted and number of times the Print This Page was clicked (the hypothesis being you'll buy in a store or something like that) or Task Completion Rates by Primary Purpose for Support, Research & Careers from your website onexit survey.

Either way you have just provided your management team with a complete picture of your website's success. And you have shown that you are brilliant because you are measuring success of all visitors on your website. Priceless.

Have you clearly identified what the micro conversions are on your website?

Benefits of measuring micro-conversions:

You'll focus on more can just the main reason the site was created.

You'll measure multi-channel impact, well beyond your website. Most people don't get budgets for web analytics because all they are focused on is measuring what happens during a small % of visits. Expand and conquer.

It will force you to understand the multiple persona's on your website, trust me that in of itself is worth a million bucks. It will encourage you to segment (my favorite activity) visitors and visits and behavior and outcomes. Success will be yours.

You'll realize the limits of a pure clickstream strategy and you'll be forced to expand beyond just Google Analytics or Omniture or CoreMetrics etc and execute a true Multiplicity strategy, that is good for your company and it is good for your career.

You'll be happy. Most people who do web analytics are sad and/or frustrated. One of reasons for it is because they are hyper focused on a small part with way more data than they can ever churn through.

By expanding your measurement horizon and seeking insights from a broader area means you'll know what to do with all this data. Which means you'll smile a lot more, because you'll feel a sense of accomplishment from your job. Happiness is good.

Convinced?

Ready to execute?

Let me share some stories to spark ideas in your mind about how to identify your own complete conversion rate picture.

They are doing very well. Fernando is quite happy with how is project is performing. But he is also very smart and he is measuring micro conversions, things that his site is trying to do that mean success for him. . . .

His micro conversions. . .

1. Registrations on the site.

2. People / Members publishing photos (core for growth).

3. (I think, my Spanish is bad!) People who sign up for premium content.

4. (I think) People who sign up for newsletters / announcements (good for future customers).

A complete picture measuring all types of behavior and all elements of success. The 1.72% conversion won't go up waaay high, but the site's success is bigger than just that one number. Above picture is how you measure that.

Makes sense right?

A quick note: Your micro conversions don't have to lead up to the macro conversion (though in this case they kind of do). In our very first example of ecommerce website notice that the micro conversions are very different from the macro, they are just subservient, a little bit, to the macro.

Social media sites are tricky because many traditional analytics tools and mindset fail at identify first what to measure and then at data capture. At the moment there are not set tools and perfect answers. For blogs I have made an attempt at creating metrics to measure holistic success.

The "macro-conversion" I use, and recommend, is RSS Subscribers, or more specifically growth of RSS Subscribers. The hardest thing to do in an attention economy is to get permission to push content, RSS represents that permission to me.

I track RSS using FeedBurner:

Of course it would be silly to get hung up on a point in time and obsess about daily up and down, so I actually track growth in Feed Subscribers over time (month to month):

Macro Conversion: Net Subscribers Added.

When it comes to micro conversions things get a bit more delightful. . . .

Clicks on the book's link to Amazon:

Ok so I have to put that into excel and actually compute the % between the red and the green, but you get my point. It is a "conversion" if people click on link and perhaps go buy a book (it is especially nice because 100% of my proceeds from the book are donated to charity!).

Since the link as a affiliate code in the link I can track conversions at Amazon's website using their affiliate reports.

Conversation Rate:

The number of user comments per post, trended over time. It represents the success at engaging visitors with your unique content and getting them to contribute their thoughts, i.e. in the most social of social environments your ability to create meaningful conversation.

For the last 30 days this number stands at approximately 30, a bit higher than my goal.

The number of unique blogs that link to your blog (with links expiring in in six months to ensure you keep creating content that causes a "ripple"). I use Technorati to measure this.

In the above image that number is 1,163. Your, or my, ability to influence others and create conversation in the ecosystem.

There is another interesting thing the above example of blog illustrates, something you can apply to your own success measurement of any type of site: Sometimes you have to go beyond just the tools you have, and other times you have to create new metrics to measure micro conversions. That's ok.

Macro + Micro = Complete Picture.

I hope the above examples help you paint your very own unique picture. Good luck!

Was that helpful? What do you measure when it comes time to identify success of your website? Any unique micro or macro conversions you would care to share? There are so many different types of websites out there, care to share conversion metrics for your site?

Comments

Another great post and very much along the lines of what I'm trying to achieve on a non-ecommerce site.

Often it isn't possible to measure the conversion to buy as products are sold through affiliates who aren't tied in to the same analytics tool and/or don't share data so freely, therefore I have devised several 'micro conversions' as you call them along the way, ending in 'purchasing intent', those visitors that entered the site and clicked on an affiliate buy link, a clear indication of 'intent to purchase'.

It certainly took me a while to get my head round an obsession with how to measure those visitors that actually bought products but now I have got over that hurdle it feels quite liberating.

Have you considered the stuff Bryan Eisenberg talks a lot about. The Micro actions that your visitors take towards completing their online goals? This is the beginning of developing what Bryan defines as Persuasion Architecture (and I'm sure he'll be happy to elaborate) and what I call "off site measurement". For example a micro action is also typing a keyword into Google – it doesn't necassarily mean I'll land at your pages, but it's a movement towards my end goal and it's important to me.

You touched on it but I think Social media is a big opportunity to find out the voice of customer not just what goes on on our websites, but off our websites. There are a number of free and paid tools that can help.

Great post, but I think it is important to note that there probably is overlap between micro and macro conversions. Following your "Traffic to Website" chart, one visitor could have inflated the Research micro conversion yet performed one macro conversion. Because of duplication, it is difficult to divide total traffic into these conversion buckets and thus accurately assess the whole picture.

Maybe this is where segmentation analysis is helpful? What percentage of traffic researched and bought something? How many visits did this take? Maybe I'm straying too far from your original concept =)

Avinash – that was a great read. I completely agree with all the different reasons one might want to track micro conversions along with their macro conversions. I also think we can use micro-conversions not just to track intermediate accomplishments but also to identify possible issues with the website that if corrected would result in an improved macro conversion (for example visitors looking for help on a certain topic or visitors abandoning a form at a certain point). This is not really a conversion, but still a 'goal' I want to track.

Great examples, Avinash. For a media site like ours, virtually all conversions are micro conversions.

One thing we like to do with these events is not just view them over a segmented denominator, but use them to DEFINE visitor segments.

We're an Omniture shop, so we use Discover to isolate these cohorts, look at their usage patterns to get a feel for how the user experiences are different, apart from the fact that one converted and another didn't. Did they view our beautiful flash demo? Do they come back?

Of course this doesn't tell you exactly what to do next, but it usually generates a lot of hypotheses and testable propositions.

I think micro actions, as you describe, it is slightly different from what I was hoping to communicate in the article. The concept of micro actions is a important one and bears understanding and quantifying. But micro conversions are tasks all by themselves, some people will convert on the site but many others are there for other purposes and my point of view is that we should measure that aggressively.

So, at the risk of confusing the issues, micro conversions are accomplishments of other goals for which people are on the site (other than what you think the site's primary purpose is).

Helen: It would be very difficult to totally "dedupe" the numbers in the scenario you describe, but I think that there is still value from measuring both macro and micro.

Exactly as you mention cleanly segmenting people will help improve the quality of data (so say start with the 100 that convert, then degrade them into small buckets), understanding the purchase behavior will help as well (this post: Excellent Analytics Tip#6: Measure Days & Visits to Purchase) and finally if you trend the numbers over time and complement them with something like 4Q (or another such tool) then I think you'll be kosher: Have greater confidence in the data and do a great job of measuring both macro and micro.

Thanks for the great comment, always nice when someone makes you think. :)

Ned: You are right, that would work as well. My stress in this post was that micro conversions can be different customer tasks or different customer segments. But. . . .

It is certainly advisable that you track the "steps leading up to macro conversion" and then eliminate barriers. In this scenario you might have micro conversions that lead directly into a macro conversion.

Chuck: Great add and a perfect use of this concept. It is also a great use of Omniture Discover since it allows so much more flexibility in defining segments and structuring your queries.

My thought though is that if you have defined those segments right then atleast it will help you explain to your management about content consumption and success of each of those segments (even if success is not ordering something) and secondly perhaps you'll get a better feel for what kinds of things might in the end lead in a macro consumption and what does not.

Maybe adding in a survey or some remote usability might even add color to your Discover analysis, to add to the testable hypothesis that you are already generating.

No doubt micro metrics demand more attention than what they have been traditionally given and this becomes more obvious when you view these metrics in light of non-ecommerce based sites. For e.g. look at the following metrics we used for a yoga website.

• Number of people reading Articles on yoga
• Number of people reading various Programs available with the institute
• Number of people using the Contact us page

Managing these metrics well was resulting in positive business growth i.e. customers were landing at the institute after interacting with the website. This suggests that these ‘soft’ metrics DO add value to the business in many ways.

The scene however changes when you have an ecommerce site. Businesses tend to put all their efforts in managing ‘Macro’ conversion rates (e.g. customers joining online) and ignoring the benefits that come out of the Micro metrics (e.g. customers physically coming to the institute and joining) thus loosing business.

I hate to use the "E" word, but we use micro conversions as indication of positive behavior – or Engagement. For an informational site, we look at things like reading a white paper, pages per visit, completing an internal search, etc. as small success events indicating a positive Engagement with our site.

On one of your posts about engagement, I mentioned we created a weighted model that combines these positive behaviors into one number to monitor on a monthly basis (with the help of the talented people at ZAAZ). It's not the most intuitive process for leadership to understand, but we use it to complement the macro conversions and watch for pain points in our site. If our macro conversions are down, usually our micro ones are too, but we can get an idea of where we should focus our attention and start testing.

Thanks again for another great post. Hope to see you in San Francisco!

Great post. I work for a food manufacturing/marketing company. We do not sell products online so there is no e-commerce transaction. Our BIG conversion is to try to get people to register with our site. Our micro-conversions are recipe-related tasks that visitors conduct. People view recipes. People print recipes (higher level of engagement than just viewing becuase they are committing resources…paper and ink from their printers). People email recipes to friends. People review recipes, etc…etc… These are our micro-conversions.

What I find interesting is looking at the relationships between these microconversions from a high level. What percentage of people that view recipes are likely to go the extra mile and print them? What percentage of people that view recipes are likely to email them? Are there relationships between your micro-conversions and your BIG conversion?

Nice post. On a (slightly) related topic: Is a high, or increasing site conversion rate always a good thing?

Sometimes I think it's a warning that something is going wrong.

Let's assume you are a retailer (not hard for me) and you a rational being (harder for me). You want to spend money creating traffic to your site until the last dollar you spend creates just a dollar in marginal, incremental profit (and the nest dollar spent would create less than a dollar in profit).

That's the point you want to stop spending, go and make the site work harder to increase conversion, so that marginal cut-off point advances.

But what if your understanding and control of your marketing activity is sub-optimal? A high conversion rate could indicate you aren't spending enough money (or rather creating enough traffic – I'm assuming you need to spend to get visitors).

Every extra dollar you spend will probably reduce your overall site conversion (because you're going to buy the best quality traffic first, right?) So as you spend more, your conversion drops until that marginal cut-off.

If your conversion rate is significantly higher than you peers, you might be missing an opportunity to generate more traffic, and more profitable sales.

Vivek: Excellent story, thank you for sharing. You have provided a near perfect example of how to use Macro and Micro conversions. Awesome!

Kristen: You can use the E word here, I mean that! The story in your comment is great, using the Micro to see where / why the Macro might be dropping.

See you in SFO!

Alice Cooper Stalker: In answer to your questions at the end of your comment….

That is precisely the place that something like a survey (or other primary or secondary market research) can be of great help.

For example at my last company we were using a onexit survey to measure things like "likelihood to recommend" (net promoter) or "likelihood to buy offline" etc, things that our micro conversions ("% who viewed the product pages") would never be able to quite answer.

It was also perfect context to the web analytics data.

Chris: Your comment reminded me of sending our online conversion reports to the Sales team. As we got better on our website (and you bet we did!) the Sales team would cringe (some would even hate us) because every dollar converted online was a dollar they could get less commission on because they were responsible for sales through the real world stores of our retail partners!

So you are absolutely right, high conversions might have multiple nuances and you have provided great examples of why and recommendations for what to do. I am grateful for that thanks!!

For any web analytics metric (or any other metric for that matter) it is critical to keep sight of what the organization is trying to achieve and then struggle as hard as possible to glean all the necessary context. That's how we can peel the layers and make our efforts more profitable.

This is something I've been thinking a lot about recently. Even outside of the conversion funnel, there are multiple smaller goals that all have value. In addition, even conversions aren't all created equal: we need to start considering how much people spend per sale, if the product mix matches our goals, if conversions represent one-time or repeat customers, and on and on. I've started referring to these types of outcome measurements as Conversion+ metrics.

this is one of the questions I've asked myself a couple of times before – I think I understand your point about conversion rates..your opinion seems to be that "yeah (macro) conversion rate is the metric I want to increase eventually – but we have to measure and improve other things to get there (overall site experience".

Or well that's what I had been thinking until I read this post hehe ;).

"A quick note: Your micro conversions don’t have to lead up to the macro conversion (though in this case they kind of do)"

—> What's the point of micro conversions not leading up to the macro conversion? Why would you care for micro conversions if they do NOT lead up to the macro conversion?

– I can only imagine this if you're making a site for fun (not working for somebody's e-commerce site)

– or if they micro conversion helps get people to buy offline

but what would be the point of a micro conversion (say posting photos/registering) if they did not lead up to a higher macro conversion rate in the end?

This one got me puzzled (because I'm sure you have a point, but I guess I'm missing it!)…?

Hello, great post and great comments and thoughtful comment reactions!
Patrick, I don't know if you are still checking back, but I think your question is important, because it could have come from any managers, executives, web developers, shop owners, etc.

"What’s the point of micro conversions not leading up to the macro conversion?" Your own replies are 'for fun' and 'offline purchase'.

I think there are very exciting further grand scale opportunities. Let's take flickr, for instance. I assume that largely thanks to increased micro conversions (register, upload, free account, etc. – lots of 'no buying' customers), flickr became steadily the Number 1 photo sharing site, attracting even more visitors, increasing the likelihood of having more dedicated buyers, getting a lot more free high-end publicity, increased overall corporate value (yahoo had a lucky strike with flickr), and last but not least, getting ideas what OTHER monetization solutions they can/ need to provide for specific micro conversions.

Avinash's blog converted into a book, or a blook. :) It is so typical. But one of the above commenters, Alice Cooper Stalker, mentioned that they have nice micro conversions with recipes.

They may be thinking of publishing their own recipe book, and turning micro into direct macro. Or setting up a totally new recipe site and using it for having a recipe community, strengthening their food manufacturing site (optimization, visibility, targeted traffic) and sales, or even selling ad space on it, etc.

Basically, in one way or another, your micro conversions will eventually lead up to potential macro conversions I think. Connecting the micro – micro, micro – macro, macro -macro dots may show more steps, twisted, entwined ways, but based on your micro conversion data you have awesome opportunities.

Thanks for the post again. I love the internet with so fantastic free stuff at our finger tips.

While Avinash hasn't replied yet, I thought I'd add my 2 cents as to your post (and Patrick's) and what I understood from Avinash's intent. For e.g. an e-commerce website, macro conversion is the purchases made on the site but again, that's only ~2% of the traffic.

What are the other key goals/conversions within the 98% that will help us reach that 2% macro goal? Registrations/Powerful product blog/Fancy social media engagement?

I think that these micro conversions help add up the story and allow the e-commerce site to dig into particular reasons for increasing or decreasing numbers behind macro conversions.

All that translates into an obsession with identifying Macro & Micro Conversions and computing Economic Value (yes even for Higher Ed sites!!). It means listening to the prospective students and website users by being agile and nimble in using Surveys, Online Usability, Testing and doing so at scale (UCD and HCI are integral to Web Analytics 2.0!).
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[…] Collaboration is dependent upon the business model. Yesterday I read a great post by Avinash Kaushik about breaking out conversions on a macro (acquisition) and micro (accessing other elements of the site) level. (This also reinforces the concept of the atomization of the internet but we aren’t going to focus on that now.) I think the only thing that Avinash missed was talking about all of a business’s contact/interaction (corporate social graph) points throughout the Internet and not just the company’s site. His point is that if we track users in a more global manner, instead of just at the point of conversion, we will have a better understanding of their online persona’s and what we can do to increase the likelihood of acquisitions in the future. […]

[…] A micro conversion point is a non shopping cart transaction. Examples include newsletter signup, catalog request or wish list signup. Better understanding of how many visitors choose these micro-conversions will give a better understanding of what a visitor really wants from your site. Also if any of these micro-conversion points has multiple steps, you can build a goal funnel and look at step abandonment, just like for your shopping cart. […]

[…] If you don’t read the Occam’s Razor blog by Avinash Kaushik, you don’t know what you’re missing. He had another great post last week, to help people identify how to measure more than Web sales as the conversion on their Web sites. He calls them micro conversions, to contrast with the macro conversion that a Web sale represents. I think he has a number of great points in the post, but I want to contrast his thinking with my own, in case my perspective feels a bit more comfortable to you. Whichever way you want to work, we both agree that you should focus on lots more than Web sales to judge your Web site’s value. […]

[…] Every ecommerce and non-ecommerce website can learn more about how your website is truly adding value / impact to your business by focusing on the “non-converting” visits and measuring successes from them. This subtle shift in thinking will also help you value your website a lot more. Avinash cited an example of how one company believed its website was adding $13 Million of value before measuring micro-conversions, and after realized it was really “worth” $43 Million to the business. […]

[…] The terms used within the open.ac.uk search domain presumably come from (potential) students who have gone through at least one micro-conversion, in that they have reached, and stayed in, the OU domain. Given that we can (sometimes) identify whether users are current students (e.g. they may be logged in to the OU domain as a student) or new to the OU, there’s a possibility of segmenting here between the search terms used to find a page by current students, and new prospects. […]

Here’s a post from Avinash Kaushik on his most essential web analytic measurements. Basically, he’s saying that we have to think about where our traffic is coming from on our websites and who’s converting.
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[…] As Avinash Kaushik said, “micro conversions are accomplishments of other goals for which people are on the site (other than what you think the site’s primary purpose is).” They are complete conversions of secondary (or tertiary) actions that are important to your visitors and are indicators of intent or potential intent to purchase. But there is some misleading advice being promoted around Microconversions that you should be aware of. […]

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We look at everything through the lens of visitor intent and task completion. We know that conventional conversion measures are mainly distortions. Few brands achieve higher than a 3-4% transactional conversion rate. We get brands thinking about the other 96%. We help brands to define their micro conversion events: downloads, requests for information, video views, content consumption, etc. Each of these functions is a core task that certain high-priority visitor segments are looking to complete. Although they precede the hard conversion event, soft conversions or completed tasks keep consumer in the buying funnel. Research has shown that 67% of visitors who complete their tasks move successfully down the funnel towards a buy.
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Quality of dialog: There’s a big difference between someone just clicking through onto a product-display page on your website, and someone being able to interact & get their direct questions answered via Twitter. The former is just a page view, the latter is close to being a bonafide micro-conversion, in Avinash Kaushik’s terms.
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How can I measure relevant and/or engaged traffic from SEO?
For most of us, we want our SEO traffic to be relevant and worthwhile. Think through the actions you’d like a visitor to take when they arrive at your site. For instance, subscribe to this blog, sign up for our newsletter, locate a brick-and-mortar store, or simply view more than one page on the site. Notice the simplicity here; they don’t necessarily have to buy something on the first visit. Capture these as goals using google analytics, and assign a value to each based on their relative importance.
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What to look for? How many of the people who micro-converted got to eventually macro-convert e.g. How many of the users who downloaded the trial came back to the website and bought it? How many days after? Yes, Google Analytics can give you this.

If the terms of micro conversions and macro conversions are still strangers to you, check out this great explanatory tutorial provided by Avinash Kaushik.
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The key is to understand the purpose of each page on your site and defining what the desired outcome is each page. In a checkout process, it’s usually easy to assess the purpose and desired outcome. But on complex, multipurpose sites, that’s rarely the case. And it takes time and experience to understand each page at this level. But in doing so, we can improve our sites and, ultimately, find meaningful ways to improve our overall conversion rate. Because, after all, our overall conversion rate is just the sum total of all the micro-conversions that occur along the way.

At what level do you monitor conversion rates on your site? How do you use this information to improve your site’s effectiveness?

P.S. If you are interested in reading more about micro-conversion check out Avinash Kaushik’s blog post on the topic.
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While conversions ofter refer to major goals a website can have, micro-conversions can reflect any goals you choose to measure user engagement with your site – something like a lead, a sale or at least a subscription. A time on site of more than 5 minutes could be a micro-conversion, or a ​third returning visit.​ See:

[…]
Why Care About Micro-Conversion?
So what is the big deal about increasing the number of prospects that go from the homepage to another page of the site? Avinash Kaushik, one of the pioneers behind the idea that micro-conversions have value, said in his blog post, Excellent Analytics Tip #13: Measure Macro AND Micro-Conversions:
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[…]
Quality of dialog: There’s a big difference between someone just clicking through onto a product-display page on your website, and someone being able to interact & get their direct questions answered via Twitter. The former is just a page view, the latter is close to being a bonafide micro-conversion, in Avinash Kaushik’s terms.
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[…]
Once you’ve built this Advanced Segment for your social media visits, you can easily compare the traffic you get from social media referrals to all other sources. This is priceless.

It allows you to compare how likely this group is to “convert” on your site compared to other types of visitors. You can even see how likely they are to log a “micro-conversion,” such as sharing with others or sending the content to a printer or bookmark. This is measured with my Content Interest Index, described in this post, and some other posts you can find here.
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Most importantly, we have to figure out how to create value for people with the new idea. This is the part that the Early Adopters tend to ignore – they usually like new things simply because they’re new. For everyone, the new idea needs to solve a problem. Avinash Kaushik explains the issue perfectly in 11 Digital Marketing Crimes Against Humanity:
When I look at winners and I separate them from the losers there is one thing that stands out. Winners have a sophisticated understanding of the holistic success of their digital existence. It comes from undertaking two simple steps: 1. Identifying their Macro and Micro Conversions and 2. Quantifying Economic Value.
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[…]
Traffic probably isn’t the most useful metric. Rather than seeking to purely increase traffic, look to see which social sites send traffic to your site/blog with high time on site and page views. Also look at which social media sites refer the traffic with the highest conversion rate. Remember that conversions aren’t just sales, subscription to RSS feeds, newsletters, whitepaper downloads, or engagement/social shares on the company blog could be considered metrics in conversion.
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[…]
Conversions. The one metric we all know we should be focusing on, and yet it’s the one thing that gets overlooked the most. So many of us focus on just one main conversion point, and forget how many other types of visitor engagement exist on our sites. These other engagement points, or less-important conversions are what experts call “micro conversions.”
World-renowned analytics expert Avinash Kaushik is a strong supporter of the use of micro conversions. In his Excellent Analytics Tip series, he explains the benefits of tracking both micro and macro conversions:
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World-renowned analytics expert Avinash Kaushik is a strong supporter of the use of micro conversions. In his Excellent Analytics Tip series, he explains the benefits of tracking both micro and macro conversions: 3. It will force you to
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Macro conversion performance is of obvious importance. However fixating solely on this single metric (or any single metric) is ill-advised. This alone will not paint the full picture of performance and in fact there may be a multitude of other user actions that indicate changes in performance. These actions are often referred to as micro conversions and mark an outcome on a website that is of less importance than the primary, or macro conversion. This is a concept that Avinash Kaushik, the renowned analytics and digital marketing evangelist, has blogged passionately about in the past.
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[…]
Conversions are one of the most important metric which often gets overlooked. We often focus so hard on one main conversion point and forget about other visitor engagements that exist on our sites. These other engagement points or less-important conversions are what experts call “micro conversions.” World-renowned analytics expert Avinash Kaushik, in his Excellent Analytics Tip series recommends:
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But just as football is a game of inches and singles translate into runs, seemingly insignificant actions on your practice website can lead to impressive results in the long run. In online marketing, they’re called micro-conversions and they provide compelling evidence that an aesthetic consumer is still considering your practice.
People don’t just come to your site to buy, notes Avinash Kaushik, digital marketing evangelist for Google. They are there to research products and services… They are looking to get support… They might be there to look at your latest blog post.
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[…]
World-renowned analytics expert Avinash Kaushik is a strong supporter of the use of micro conversions. In his Excellent Analytics Tip series, he explains the benefits of tracking both micro and macro conversions:
[…]

[…]
Conversions. The one metric we all know we should be focusing on, and yet it’s the one thing that gets overlooked the most. So many of us focus on just one main conversion point, and forget how many other types of visitor engagement exist on our sites. These other engagement points, or less-important conversions are what experts call “micro conversions.” World-renowned analytics expert Avinash Kaushik is a strong supporter of the use of micro conversions. In his Excellent Analytics Tip series, he explains the benefits of tracking both micro and macro conversions:
[…]

[…]
Micro-conversions include converting readers into blog or newsletter subscribers & social media friends. Collecting user information is a great way to convert transient readers into fans. You can focus on driving more traffic to your site or converting more visitors. Or both. Whatever you decide, content is the source of both attraction and conversion when it’s well defined and well promoted.
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[…]
Micro-conversion data provides opportunities to demonstrate social media’s long term value to your manager. Avinash Kaushik brilliantly established this point in 2008 and illustrates the value that encouraging and tracking multiple micro-conversions per customer can provide. Who knows really if that one time purchaser on your site may only have bought from you because your price was lower that week than the other company he usually does business with? Use social media to offer consumers value over a series of micro-conversions such as white paper downloads, product demo video views, etc. Your payback over time is customer loyalty and more potential sales. Ask yourself and your manager: What is the value of a loyal customer versus an occasional customer? Try to calculate how much your average customer spends on your services and measure how many customers you’re generating through social media outlets.
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Now, the trickiest part is how to measure the economic value of your campaigns. Well, these are micro and macro conversions that you can set-up using your Analytics. Well, if you have the luxury of having an Analytics guy in the house, you are lucky, but if not, then you need to churn out some numbers and data in order to convince your boss or client for your next social media campaign budget. Without this business value metric, you’re only to be considered a hipster roaming around waiting for that next big thing or shiny tool to convince your client/boss. Economic Value in social media campaigns takes into account mostly the micro conversions. Avinash Kaushnik explains it pretty damn well here.
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Google (organic): Once our piece lifts off, we expect to acquire traffic for informational key phrases around “camping destinations”. Yes, not all these are going to purchase our product. But some may share it, like our Facebook page, follow us on Twitter, join our email list or help us amplify the content. Think both macro and micro conversions.
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Noteworthy was Claudiu from paditrack.com that managed to bring about a huge insight for me and that was that customers don't buy usually at first sight. Which seems obvious until you spend three months trying to improve conversions on a website and never give any thoughts about how you're going to keep in touch (except retargeting) with visitors that aren't yet ready to buy. Apparently the process of going from visitor to customer is not a straight /funnel line. You need intermediate steps (aka micro-conversions) in order to start building a relationship with the customer. How cool is that? (more on this topic)
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This is what a CMO cares about and budgets for, and while this is should not be your primary objective, it is important to make sure your investment in social media can directly affect the company’s bottom line. Avinash has two great blogs about Micro/Macro Conversions and Economic Value. These will help you figure out how to set up your conversions and how to assign value. That’s key, because you need both to actually see the big picture.
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These are what Avinash Kaushik would call macro goals. They’re the reason the site exists – usually to make money. But they’re not the only way to determine your website’s performance. There are smaller steps along the way to that macro goal. This is especially true of B2B websites where the sales cycle is longer and generating interest in a big purchase or contract can take some time. Micro goals on your site might include watching a video, signing up for your newsletter or downloading a white paper.
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Social media might not always play a direct or huge role in macro-conversions but would largely impact micro-conversions. For example, calculating for the value per visitor referred by social networks on interactions such as downloading an infographic, signing up for a newsletter, researching, etc. For a detailed explanation on micro- and macro-conversions and economic value, no one but Avinash can lay them out as clearly and succinctly: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/excellent-analytics-tip-13-measure-macro-and-micro-conversions/
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These are what Avinash Kaushik would call macro goals. They’re the reason the site exists – usually to make money. But they’re not the only way to determine your website’s performance. There are smaller steps along the way to that macro goal. This is especially true of B2B websites where the sales cycle is longer and generating interest in a big purchase or contract can take some time.[…]

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To come up with the figure of €3.75, we multiplied our e-commerce conversion rate from emails by average order value (again, for email conversions) and came out with €3.75. So, thanks to Avinash and PadiAct, we’ve been able to work out that an email subscriber is worth around €3.75 to our business. Neat, huh?
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A macro conversion in that same scenario would be testing if a change impacted conversion rates. So instead of just testing the button color to see if it impacted click through rates, the macro version of that test would have been testing button color to see if it impacted conversion rates. Now this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look at micro conversions, but you should focus on macro conversions while keeping micro conversions in mind.
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[…] to revenue. For example, more (relevant and engaged) website visitors leads to more micro and macro conversions, which leads to more revenue. Or, a larger (opt-in) email list of excited users equals more […]

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Avinash has multiple great posts on this subject micro-conversions, net income & goal values. I’ve tried taking all of this in and meld together an approach to make all of these ideas work together. You should read Avinash’s posts first and then take a look at my conclusion. So I see three steps to putting together a strategy that values all the objectives of a website.
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Using your available data, set up microconversions for key actions. These could be file downloads, watched videos, etc. To see more information and to dig in deeper with microconversions, check out Avinash’s blog. He does a great job breaking down site goal values in more detail.
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Even micro-conversions can be hugely valuable to your business and keep the quality of your links high. You can try to get people to sign up for your email list or follow you on a social channel, both of which are valuable to your business and help you build up assets that Google can’t take away.
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Whether you’re trying to improve your own website or giving recommendations to someone else, conversion rate optimisation should be a big part of your conversation. Conversion rate optimisation is about doing more with the visitors you’re already getting; it’s the steps you can take to improve the likelihood that visitors will complete your macro- and micro-conversions. And since website conversion is your key to profitability, it’s important!
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Before we get into the different ways you can track conversions on your website, let’s go over the two different kind of conversions. If you’re a follower of Avinash Kaushik’s blog then you’ll be familiar with macro and micro-conversions. A macro-conversion is a critical business conversion such as a lead form submission or an actual purchase. A micro-conversion tracks user behavior and smaller event actions (signing up for a newsletter, media play, etc).
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This now famous KPI is the one that everyone talks about and with good reason. A conversion is nothing less than the realization of desired outcome on your site; it’s a win for you! Many people think that only sales are conversion. In fact, there exist many types of conversions. Avinash wrote an article about micro and macro conversion that I encourage you to read.
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The A stands for activate. This is basically the second level of action from the client. It involves more efforts and shows more consideration for your brand from the user. How many sales did we make, the number of e-books downloaded, the number of subscribers to our newsletter are all concrete actions made by your users that generally occurs further in the conversion funnel, those are micro or macro conversions.
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The great news is that you don’t need to go overboard with analyzing the traffic and setting up very complex tests to see if you can boost your conversion rates (both micro-conversions and macro-conversions.) Sometimes, all you need are small nudges or quick changes to see radically improved results.
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You want comments because you want people to consider your point of view. If they consider your perspective, it’ll be much easier to get them sign up for your email list. If they sign up for your email, it’ll be much easier to get them to buy. Getting comments is a micro-conversion – and a very misunderstood one at that. You don’t want comments just to validate the post– that’s a waste. You want comments so visitors will freely reveal information you couldn’t get otherwise. With this information, you can develop better products, create better marketing, and be sure that you’re attracting the right people into your funnel.
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Getting comments is a micro-conversion – and a very misunderstood one at that. You don’t want comments just to validate the post– that’s a waste. You want comments so visitors will freely reveal information you couldn’t get otherwise. With this information, you can develop better products, create better marketing, and be sure that you’re attracting the right people into your funnel.
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Then define success for your execution specifically – which will depend on your platform and objectives. Look for micro conversions, or what I like to call “success events.” Of course don’t get paralyzed by the data. If you have questions, run some tests, try new stuff. That’s the beauty of digital! It can change! And when you get it right you’ll be able to tell everyone how you owned that engagement all over the place.
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The A stands for activate. This is basically the second level of action from the client. It involves more efforts and shows more consideration for your brand from the user. How many sales did we make, the number of e-books downloaded, the number of subscribers to our newsletter are all concrete actions made by your users that generally occurs further in the conversion funnel, those are micro or macro conversions.
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Although I haven’t enlisted the services of either company they did get a micro conversion out of me and over a year later I still remember both brands, who I’d never heard of before and here I am blogging to you about them. Both campaigns reminded me of the art of simplicity and how impactful simplicity can be.
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Websites often have strong & bold CTA (Call To Action), offering the user to sign up to a trial or to contact you, called Macro-Conversions. They less often have Micro-Conversions, which offer smaller gains, like Social Media follows, newsletter subscribe etc… Including those allows you to earn permission and to market the product to the user over time.
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If you can increase the number of people who complete these micro conversions then your macro conversion will see a corresponding boost both today and tomorrow. Measuring micro conversion rates might sound difficult, but it’s actually relatively easy. If you’re a fan of Avinsh Kaushik’s then you might have read one of his many posts about them.
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Measure micro-conversions. A click on ‘Add To Cart’ would be categorized as a macro-conversion but a micro-conversion may be logging in, clicking to read more details, sharing on social media, etc. Tracking micro-conversions helps us get a better sense of where people are on the path to converting and are valuable leads for future macro-conversions. Read about how to track micro-conversions and tips on measuring conversions.
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What information do you want your target audience to walk away with? What action do you want them to take after they've read your content? Whether you're aiming to increase traffic, social shares, downloads of your latest e-book, or boost sales or improve brand awareness, beginning with the end in mind will help you develop content that will actually provide the results you want. Identify your micro and macro conversion goals.
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This is a pretty crucial one and the reasons should be obvious. You need to focus your data gathering and testing around hitting these goals. There are times when some goals may be less obvious than others. These are sometimes called micro-conversions and can include things that contribute to the bigger goal. For example, you may find that customers who signup to your email newsletter are more likely to become repeat customers than those who don’t. Therefore, a micro-conversion would be to get people signed up to your email list.
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Microconversions are behavioural indicators of customers haven’t fully reached your main objective but they’ve been coming closer. Macroconversions point out that customers are reaching the main objective.
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This is a pretty crucial one and the reasons should be obvious. You need to focus your data gathering and testing around hitting these goals. There are times when some goals may be less obvious than others. These are sometimes called micro-conversions and can include things that contribute to the bigger goal. For example, you may find that customers who signup to your email newsletter are more likely to become repeat customers than those who don't. Therefore, a micro-conversion would be to get people signed up to your email list.
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The opportunity to build a sales funnel and an engine of conversion in online advertising offers brands an unparalled dating experience. The ability to build little moments of micro-conversions (hat-tip to Avinash Kaushik) and manipulate your online advertising to be more reflective of a consumer’s true path to purchase has never been easier.
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They are important to track, and vary in their definition from company to company. Often they reflect a conversion action other than a sale; such as a white paper download, a registration for a newsletter or a request for a free report. Micro conversions should not be overlooked as they can be indicators as to the type of content that the audience finds valuable. (Read an extensive and highly valuable discussion by Avinash Kaushik about this topic. He champions this line of thinking and offers detailed examples on how and why to track micro conversions.) These micro conversions (and any others marketers wish to create) can be set up as goals in Google Analytics then tracked via Google Analytics’ social conversion reporting. In this way marketers can see which social network visitors completed specific goal conversions.
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Of course, a business manager would not turn to social media platforms without money in mind. The crux of all these social media KPIs is how they all translate into profit at the end of the day. To measure the economic value of your campaigns, some micro and macro conversions need to be set up using your Analytics. See Avinash’s explanation of the conversion rate here:
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Then once you have the data, add up the total of conversation, amplification, and applause for a given time period, and divide each total by the number of posts. Economic value will require a bit more homework on your end. You’ll need to assign monetary value to the different actions that occur via social media and your sales funnel. Kaushik wrote a pair of helpful posts on conversions and economic value that can help sort this out.
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Is it the Kaushikian “minor conversions” and “macro conversions” that should be instrumented with event and goal layers? Is there a scenario from session start to the purchase that should be tracked? What about shopping cart abandonment and reentering the funnel at a later date to complete the purchase?
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Most of the time, especially with social media, they don’t happen this way. There are times when prospects abandon the cart or they click through, leave and then return later. How do we measure these conversions? The first step is to define what conversion really means and add goals and tags to the series of events that lead up to it. Author and digital marketing evangelist Avinash Kaushik’s MACRO-LEVEL AND MICRO-LEVEL CONVERSIONS will make it more feasible for you to track this.
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Leading people from social to your website is often a wonderful thing. The reason being is that your website is where some significant conversions happens. You home (website) is where more information about your purpose is, it is where you email sign form is, your phone number, testimonials, and all types of micro and macro conversion points. By the way, remember you don’t own your social accounts, so if Facbeook decides to shut down tomorrow, say Goodbye to your audience.
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For example, if your ecommerce site is only capable of measuring order submissions (or worse yet, leads), make it your first order of business to be able to track that order submission through to a true paid sale. Then ensure that your team always has an eye on these true conversions in addition to any intermediate steps and secondary website goals. There are many benefits of measuring micro conversion rates, but the work must be done to map them to a tangible macro conversion or you run the risk of optimizing for a false conversion goal.
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For example, if your ecommerce site is only capable of measuring order submissions (or worse yet, leads), make it your first order of business to be able to track that order submission through to a true paid sale. Then ensure that your team always has an eye on these true conversions in addition to any intermediate steps and secondary website goals. There are many benefits of measuring micro conversion rates, but the work must be done to map them to a tangible macro conversion or you run the risk of optimizing for a false conversion goal.
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The most important thing for us is to know which “user activity” to optimize. This “user activity” can be directly related to the growth of our business (eg. increase in sales, increase in revenue, decrease in churn rate, increase in membership sign-ups) or it can indirectly impact our business results (eg. increase in users watching product videos for an ecommerce site, increase in Twitter followers etc). For those interested in understanding different conversion types better and setting goals for the business, I recommend Avinash Kaushik’s article about macro & micro conversions.
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These details give not just the total amount of purchase made by the buyer but also the full trail they took before the purchase, while, and after the purchase. Prior to this update, marketers didn’t possess the comprehensive conversion tracking mechanism for twitter promoted ads. For calculating the ROI from normal tweets, business’ will have to build an in-house solution acquiring all the before purchase data (micro conversions), and combine it with clickstream data and purchase details (macro conversions). Read Avinash Kaushik’s blog on micro and macro conversions to understand more about these terms.
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Macro conversions are important but don’t ignore smaller conversion points. The smaller conversions are referred to as micro conversions. You need to track both macro and micro conversions to get a complete picture. Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik, wrote an article explaining the benefits of focusing on more than macro conversions. If you need any further convincing, I’d recommend reading Avinash’s article.
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Every single user is going to convert in small ways before they convert in a big way. What are these small ways? That’s what you get to decide based on the development and architecture of your site. That’s where you realize that micro conversions are awesome. You’ll never know how those medley of micro conversions are going down unless you track them. Avinash Kaushik, demigod of analytics, beats the micro conversion drum as hard as anyone that I know.
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